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links for 2009-05-13

"It turns out that Dorothy could have gone home at any time during the movie! But if Glinda had just told her that clicking her ruby slippers together would teleport her home, Dorothy would have been unable to believe it. She had to learn it for herself or she could never learn it."

"Aside from a few 'developer's favorite' quests, it's very hard to find the 'fun but not exploitative' missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low — certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place."

"So the developers are creating a chilling effect on their own content generator. Now it’s risky for players to even use user-created quests."